Let's Get Criminal

by Lev Raphael

  “Even though you shared an office?”

  “It wasn’t my choice.”

  Valley nodded. “When’s the last time you saw Professor Cross?”

  I hesitated. “Yesterday.”

  “And what time was that?”

  “Dinner.”

  “Who else was there?”

  “Just Stefan and me.”

  Valley turned to Stefan. “And where was this?”

  “Our house,” Stefan brought out quietly. “Nick and I live together.”

  Valley smiled. “Professor Cross was your dinner guest. When did he arrive—when did he leave?”

  “Seven o’clock,” I said. “And he was gone by ten.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  I shrugged helplessly. How was I supposed to answer that one? Stefan did: “We talked about the university, about our careers.”

  Valley asked Stefan, “How would you describe his mood?”

  Stefan and I looked at each other, looked back at Valley. “That’s hard to do,” I said.

  “But you’re an English professor, right? Words are your business.”

  His eyes seemed alive with malice. The silence dragged on until Valley abruptly broke it himself with “What was the occasion? Nothing special? Have you had dinner with him before for no special reason? What else have you done together?”

  I felt like an idiot, and a liar.

  Valley was not gloating, exactly, but he seemed delighted to be making us squirm. He leaned back in his chair. “How would you describe your relationship with the deceased?”

  Stefan said, “He was a colleague.”

  “Who neither one of you seemed to like, but invited to dinner anyway.”

  Stefan bristled. “Detective Valley, if you only had dinner with people you liked, wouldn’t you spend a lot of time alone?”

  Valley shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.” Looking at me very intently, Valley said, “Tell me about his mood. Was he depressed? Was he taking any medication, did he drink, anything like that?”

  “I don’t know. We weren’t living together, just sharing an office.”

  And now Valley smiled. “Did you like Professor Cross?” he asked Stefan.

  “Not really, no.”

  I was afraid to look at Stefan or the detective because Stefan’s answer was so, well, incomplete.

  “Did you know him well?”

  Stefan sighed. “Not exactly.”

  “Do you know his friends, any of his family, anything about him?”

  Stefan shrugged. “Why should I?”

  I had to stop this, so I asked the detective, “Do you really think Perry Cross might have killed himself?”

  Valley scowled at me, but then he said, “It’s a possibility. That’s why I want to know if he was happy here.”

  “Well, he wasn’t,” I said. “He hasn’t had much of a career until now, and there’s no guarantee he would get tenure at State. With jobs drying up all over, he was doomed.”

  I felt Stefan stir uncomfortably while I spoke, and he coughed when I stopped.

  “Doomed,” Valley said. “Interesting. But he couldn’t know how things would turn out at SUM.” Valley went on, as if trying to catch me in a lie. “Not so soon.”

  “Well.…” I was beginning to wonder if Perry had realized after dinner that he hadn’t really scored any points against me, that it was hopeless trying to cause trouble. But could he have been that astute, that sensitive to realize what I didn’t even understand until Stefan told me how he felt? And was knowing that Stefan didn’t want him enough to make Perry kill himself in however unlikely a way?

  “What did you find at his apartment?” I asked.

  Valley frowned.

  “I assume you did some kind of search, right? That’s what always happens on TV, anyway.”

  “He was working on grading papers last night,” Valley said grudgingly.

  “That explains everything! There were too many punctuation problems and he flipped out.”

  I grinned at Stefan, who looked at me wide-eyed.

  Valley nodded now, kept nodding, as if something were beginning to make sense to him. “What time did Professor Cross leave your house?” He fixed my eyes as if daring me to blink.

  “We told you—around ten o’clock.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “And where were you early this morning, from approximately two o’clock to four o’clock? Both of you?”

  “Is that when he died?” I asked eagerly.

  Valley seemed to hesitate, and then shook his head. I wasn’t sure if he was answering the question or what, exactly.

  “Where were you?” Valley repeated. “From two o’clock to four o’clock.”

  “At home,” I said. “In bed. We live together—but then you know that already.”

  Valley didn’t smile. “In bed. Asleep?”

  I didn’t look at Stefan as I said, “Actually, we were wide awake, if you get what I mean.” I smiled. “If you want more details, I’d be happy to supply them.”

  “And you knew what time it was? You turned on the lights? The clock dial glows in the dark?”

  “A freight train “comes through town right around two every morning. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

  “And—”

  “Are you trying to find out if one of us killed him? You think he was murdered? Why? Were there any signs of a struggle? Was he wounded?”

  Valley ignored those questions and asked one of his own. “Did he have any enemies?”

  I couldn’t really answer without revealing that Stefan had lied about how well he knew Perry Cross.

  “He wasn’t very popular around here,” Stefan said a little awkwardly.

  And in the silence, I thought it was a remark that would sound suspicious to anyone: after all, Perry Cross had only been in the department for a month.

  Valley nodded and rose. “Thank you for your time,” he said. “I’ll be back if I have more questions, or I’ll call you.”

  I stalked to the doorway, watched the detective head down the hall to the exit. I closed the door.

  Stefan was up and staring out the window.

  “Why did you lie about Perry?” I asked.

  Stefan didn’t turn around. “He’s dead, what does it matter? It’s nobody’s business how well I know him.” After a moment, he added, “Knew him. And wait a minute! You told him the truth? What was that stuff about us being ‘wide awake’ in the middle of the night? Were you trying to antagonize him? What for?”

  “Stefan, he was a creep, a fag-hater.”

  “Right.”

  I felt we were on the edge of a terrible argument, and I didn’t understand why or what exactly it was about. I sat down, not letting myself say anything nasty, and just took a few deep breaths. “Why did you lie about Perry?”

  “I don’t want people to know. It’s one thing being out, it’s another having people gossip about you.”

  “But it’s not a secret that Perry was at our place for dinner.”

  Stefan shut down, the way he does when he thinks talking to me is hopeless.

  “I’ll see you later, back home,” he said, walking out.

  And he was gone before I could ask him what he’d been doing when I woke up at two o’clock and found myself alone in bed.

  7

  I SAT IN MY OFFICE AS IF THE WHOLE WEIGHT of Parker Hall had descended on me. The building was a sad; featureless, ramshackle heap of brick and sandstone that looked like an abandoned nineteenth-century mental institution. It had badly worn staircases, sagging floors, and flaking ceilings. The bathrooms were all moldy and marred by leaking pipes. Right now, I felt just as decrepit.

  Like many universities, SUM had a history of cruelly underfunding the Humanities compared to the lavish sums it threw at the Medical School, Business, and Engineering (in our case, add Agricultural Economics). The salaries were lower, budgets tighter, support staffs smaller, even supplies far
less plentiful. The disparities were especially obvious when you looked at the different buildings. The privileged departments and colleges either had gleaming new air-conditioned facilities and offices bristling with computers, or older buildings that had been as lovingly restored and updated as if they were smack in the middle of a rapidly gentrifying city neighborhood.

  Parker was a dump.

  From out in the hall I suddenly heard a cheerful “Hi, Professor Hoffman.”

  At the door was a former student of mine, Angela Sandoval.

  “I was just dropping a paper off for Professor Davidoff,” Angela said, turning to go. She looked so bright and pretty she was completely out of place in this dim setting.

  Then something hit me. “Angela! Are you still a Criminal Justice major?”

  Angela nodded.

  “Do you have a few minutes?”

  “Sure.” She came in and sat right down, as relaxed and easygoing as she’d been last semester, the kind of student who smiles encouragingly at professors throughout class, but not because she’s witless or angling for a grade. Angela just showed her enjoyment and comprehension; every class should have at least one student like that.

  “Angela, do you know anything about the Campus Police?”

  “A shitload!” She blushed. “Sorry. I know a lot—I wrote a whole paper about them last year.”

  “Perfect. What are they—are they real cops?”

  “Definitely. Fully authorized by the state—just like police in a town. SUM is their jurisdiction. If you call 911 on campus, that’s who responds. The phone system is set up that way.”

  “Can they arrest people?”

  “Oh, for sure!” She squinted a little, as if trying to visualize the paper she’d written. “I think there’s about sixty of them all together, but some of those are administrators. They’re all armed, though. Most of them served in other police forces around the state first—this is considered a great job. Some of them have Master’s degrees, or law.”

  “What kind of crimes do they deal with?”

  “Everything! Rape, assault, burglary. Mostly ‘malicious destruction of property’—you know, drunk students trashing a dorm or knocking over a parking meter.”

  “How about murder?”

  Her brown eyes went wide. “Was somebody murdered? Wait! That professor in the river—him? Was he murdered? You think he was murdered?”

  “I don’t know. But if they thought it was murder, would they contact anybody, like the Michiganapolis police?”

  “No way. They’d investigate it themselves. Why do you ask?”

  “The man in the river? He was my office mate.”

  “Wow!” Angela stared over at Perry Cross’s desk as if it were a shrine and she were a supplicant.

  I went on. “So what does that mean when they … investigate:

  She considered it a moment. “Well. First they’d secure the scene and gather all the evidence, examine the body to see its condition and if anything was missing. Like a wallet, watch, whatever. They contact the Medical Examiner—the ME—and the County Prosecutor. Then they send the body to the morgue at Robbins Hospital in town for the autopsy. That can take a while unless they’re in a hurry.”

  “What else?”

  She bit her lips. “Umm…. They’d find out who the last person was to see him, call his family, check medical records, interview friends, look for his car, go to his house, see if he was on any medication. All of that stuff.” Suddenly she seemed to see me more clearly. “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  It was so unexpected I blurted out the answer: “Last night.”

  “Oh, wow! Are you a suspect? This is way cool!”

  I managed to say, “There aren’t any suspects yet. At least I don’t think so.”

  “Well, my cousin’s a great lawyer, if you need one. He’s right here in town.”

  “How would they know if it was murder?”

  “You mean instead of an accident, or suicide? They’d look for signs of a struggle—cuts, abrasions, like that. The nature of the wounds would tell you a lot—” She broke off. “Hey, are you investigating this? Like Jessica Fletcher or something?” She seemed beside herself with excitement. “Because if you are, remember that cool guy Neil Case in my class last year? His mom is the County ME. You should call her.”

  Angela suddenly checked her watch. “Shit!” She blushed again, then faked smacking her cheek. “Sorry. I have to get to the library!”

  I thanked her and she rushed off leaving me even more depressed than when she’d said hello in the hallway. It was a big mistake for me not to take Detective Valley seriously—he was the real thing.

  I headed downstairs for my mail. The department of English, American Studies, and Rhetoric was clearly one of SUM’s stepchildren. You saw that in the main office, which was pitiful and depressing. The grimy linoleum floor was cracked, the windows rattled in the winter and the walls hadn’t been painted in years; they were still some kind of green: Nile, bile, or vile. As if that wasn’t grim enough, when you walked in the one door to the main office, you almost bumped right into a high, forbidding, linoleum-topped counter that kept people as far as possible from the secretaries and the chair’s office somewhere beyond all the looming file cabinets.

  It was not a welcoming place.

  There was very little room to congregate and chat in front of the counter, but today it was as crowded as during registration when frantic frustrated students broke against the counter like waves of dirty surf. Faculty members were standing around holding their mail, pretending to be involved in it, but chatting about Perry Cross. I had heard his name from out in the hallway.

  Their faces were all awash in eagerness, as if some televangelist had been found committing bizarre but laughable peccadillos in a trailer park. Larry Rich, the battered ex-hippie who taught Renaissance drama and poetry, was there; and Martin Wardell, the Victorian specialist who never returned student papers on time; Alec Wade, the oily fashion plate Colonialist; Les “Jock” Peterman, the rangy ’60s expert, who was always injuring himself at pick-up games of basketball with students.

  Everyone stopped talking now when I walked into the office. Alec Wade drew back as if I was contagious and Martin Wardell looked away. Larry Rich cleared his throat. “They’re asking about you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The Campus Police are asking people about you and Stefan. About last night.”

  “But we didn’t do anything! We just had Perry to dinner!”

  Everyone’s eyes were on me now as if I had just confessed my guilt. Oh, God—what if no one else had seen him last night after dinner?

  Then from inside the chair’s office came what sounded like a book being hurled at a wall and a smothered but audible “God damn it!” Broadshaw rocketed out of his office over to a file cabinet, almost knocking one of the secretaries over en route (that was why people called him “Broadside” behind his back).

  While they all turned to stare at the chair, I grabbed my mail and left.

  But just outside the office door I was stopped by Serena Fisch, who glided over from the coffee room. She was grinning and waved me to the battered bench against the wall under a bulletin board jammed with notices about conferences, special theme issues of scholarly journals, and new publications. Swathed in black with touches of white, she looked like a chic ex-nun today.

  “So you and Stefan got to give Perry his farewell dinner.”

  Her malice was infectious; despite myself, I smiled.

  She was apparently waiting for more, but I didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t care what people are insinuating. I don’t believe you and Stefan would have gone to all the trouble of making dinner for someone you wanted to kill. So do you think it was drugs?” she asked. I must have registered confusion, because she went on, “Was it a drug deal that went sour? Can’t you see some muscled tough with a ponytail holding his head under water?”

  “You read too many thrille
rs.” But I wondered. There had been a number of shooting deaths in Michiganapolis and some suburbs over the last year, and the police almost always classified them as “drug-related.” Was that true, or just a catch-all phrase that attempted to make violence seem rational in some way, and thus less threatening, even invisible?

  “What a way to go,” she said, “in the river. Drowning in duck shit.” Serena wriggled her shoulders and I thought of the German word for delighting in someone else’s misery, Schadenfreude. But this went even further.

  “How do you know he drowned? I thought nobody was sure yet what happened.”

  Serena ignored my question. “Maybe Perry was cruising,” she said languorously, as if talking about a trip in the Caribbean rather than hunting for sex.

  So she knew he was gay, knew for sure, hadn’t just wondered or assumed. Had everyone known? “Cruising at the Administration bridge?” I asked. “In the middle of the night?”

  She shrugged it off, as if the place and time were inconsequential kinks of Perry’s.

  “Who the hell is out that late?” I asked, and then remembered my conversation with Stefan about someone biking near the river. I could answer my own question; people ran at night on campus, some workaholics like Rose Waterman stewed in their offices, and maybe someone from town was trying to break into a building or steal a bike or something. But if you were looking for sex, wouldn’t you do it indoors and at a more reasonable hour? Unless the weirdness and publicity of the bridge was the whole point…. Like rest-stop sex. I hadn’t been at SUM long enough to know where they were, but I imagined that like any school, SUM had tearooms and cruising spots. Why not by the river on that pretty terrace? Couples brought wine there early in the evening, publicly romantic—so maybe later, when campus was deserted, something less romantic took over.

  Serena tapped my knee. “I’m going to cover Perry’s Canadian Lit survey and the Margaret Atwood seminar.”

  “But that’s a major overload!”

  “Lynn’s giving me a reduced load spring semester and the following fall off. He’s arranged it with the dean.”

  That meant Serena would be off from the university from mid-May to mid-January. I thought of all those months away from teaching. I was envious; even if you like to teach, the time off is heavenly. No grades to agonize over, no exams to write, and best of all, no papers to read. That assault of other people’s voices, that constant noise in your head, ceases for a while, and you feel like you’re no longer living in an airport, intermittently deafened and stunned.